Saturday, March 30, 2013

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Apple's iCloud is another networking failure

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 12:01 PM PDT

When Apple announced that it was moving into cloud based computing, the Tame Apple Press enthused about it so loudly the more sceptical voices were shouted down.

The reason there were sceptics was because while Apple gear might look sexy, its networking capability was legendarily pants. Right from its early days, Apple's networking solutions were incredibly unreliable.

Anyone who had to suffer through the 1990s on AppleTalk who had not been reduced to a gibbering wreck was unlikely to trust Jobs' Mob networking technology ever again.

Things did not get better either. From Apple server to AirPort, Jobs' Mob seemed to be light years behind networking on other computing. When Steve Jobs returned, the inconsistency was made it even more unpleasant by the fact that every bit of networking gear was peddled with the same smugness as its consumer gear.

When we heard that the iCloud was coming out we expected there to be huge problems. Cloud technology is supposed to be cutting edge networking and it is exactly the sort of thing that Apple has done badly.

Yet, out trotted the usually marketing. Apple smugly told us that it was a "convenient and centralised way to manage data on Macs and iOS devices: sync contacts and bookmarks, re-download music and apps, back up iOS devices, and sync documents and data for third-party apps as MobileMe did."

Hang on, MobileMe? That was launched to negative reviews and even Jobs could not work out what the product was supposed to do. When someone explained to him what it was supposed o be doing Jobs reportedly shot back, "So why doesn't it do that?"

In an internal email sent to Apple employees in 2008, Jobs admitted that MobileMe was "not up to Apple's standards".

Jobs was expecting trouble when he announced iCloud in 2011 and it was supposed to entirely replace the still troubled MobileMe. According to CNN,  he asked why should people believe Apple when they were the ones who brought MobileMe to the cosmos.

Only a year later cracks are starting to appear in the iCloud distortion field. Third-party developers have begun to speak out about the difficulty involved in working with Apple's cloud service.

The Verge said that people are moaning about data loss and corruption to unexpected Apple ID use cases. They are also unable to ship products with working iCloud support.

It is starting to look like Apple's inability to understand networking is coming to fore again.

Bare Bones Software's Rich Siegel told Ars Technica  that the iCloud is made up of too many bits, each with a role to play.

He said that there were many different ways in which the iCloud enables the syncing of data and users and developers are kept in the dark when things go wrong.

Apple's iCloud simply declares that a file upload has timed out which is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, because it does not say what has gone wrong.

Jobs' Mob also forgot to put in an option to recover, which means the user has to try again until it finally works, if it ever does.

Developers fume how iCloud handles a user's data if the user chooses to turn off document and data syncing. For some reason this completely removes a user's locally stored iCloud data.

This is all basic stuff for cutting edge cloud tech and the question was why Apple thought it was qualified to do it in the first place. If there were not a lot of people wanting to play with Apple's Walled Garden of Delights, it is unlikely that developers would be following it at all.

Recently an outfit called Black Pixel wrote that iCloud and Core Data syncing had problems that it could not fix.

Since Apple has not been able to fix the problems, Black Pixel created its own syncing services  and moved to Dropbox instead.

iCloud's failure represents a philosophical problem Apple just does not get. The cloud is networking and networking is allowing the free flow of communications between users. Apple's philosophy is totally alien to that idea. The cloud is about things being interconnected and seamless. But to Jobs' Mob each seam is another layer of protection, another thing to control and as a result it has built a controlled cloud which does not really work. 

Shroud of Turin not a medieval fake

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 10:08 AM PDT

A new series of tests carried out by the University of Padua on the Shroud of Turin indicate that it might be a little older than everyone thought.

Many believed that the Shroud of Turin was a medieval forgery, in fact some have even suggested that it might have been knocked up by Leonardo deVinci to rustle up a bit of tourism for the city.

Of course there are also those who are convinced that it really was the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth, a Jewish preacher who was outed after his death by a man who never met him as the son of God.

The 14-foot-long cloth bearing the image of a man with wounds similar to those suffered by someone crucified was analysed by university scientists using infrared light.

Giulio Fanti, a professor at Padua University found that the shroud was aged between 280 BC and AD 220. Based on this, of course, it could also have been Antiochus One Eye's grave wrapping or belonged to the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus's bath towel. It did not really come with Jesus's name sewn in the corner by his mum.

Fanti, a Catholic, told the Telegraph that the results were based on 15 years of research on fibres taken from the cloth, which were subjected to radiation intensity tests.

He rejected the conclusion of carbon dating tests conducted in 1988 that bolstered the theory the shroud was made in the 13th or 14th century in a medieval forgery. Fanti insisted that these were stuffed up by laboratory contamination.

The cloth is housed in Turin Cathedral in northwest Italy where it was apparently dropped off by the Knights Templar on their way back from one of the crusades. There were a lot of such relics forged during this time as the various cities tried to make a bob or two on the tourist trade. It was not enough to have a saint, you had to have an original bit of a biblical character to rope in the punters.

Of course, Fanti's book is being released just as Christians everywhere celebrate the crucifixion of their god, which was what was supposed to have created the shroud in the first place. 

Stanford Uni evokes BIL gates to control your cells

Posted: 29 Mar 2013 09:37 AM PDT

A team of Stanford University bioengineers have worked out a way to turn genetic material into the equivalent of transistors.

Dubbed the "transcriptor", the new transistors are a key component behind amplifying genetic logic.

According to Science Codex, researcher Jerome Bonnet said the creation of the transcriptor allows engineers to compute inside living cells. They can record when cells have been exposed to certain external stimuli or environmental factors, or even to turn on and off cell reproduction as needed.

Drew Endy, assistant professor of bioengineering and the paper's senior author said that biological computers can be used to study and reprogram living systems, monitor environments and improve cellular therapeutics.

The transcriptor controls the flow of a specific protein, RNA polymerase, as it travels along a strand of DNA.

To do this the researchers repurposed a group of natural proteins, called integrases, to gain digital control over the flow of RNA polymerase along DNA, which in turn allowed the team to engineer amplifying genetic logic.

They can now build logic gates that can derive true-false answers to virtually any biochemical question that might be posed within a cell. These are dubbed "Boolean Integrase Logic," or "BIL gates" (no, really).

Of course, it will be a while before these will run any serious computing jobs. Instead they are probably destined to be limited to a cell, but they are the third and final component of a biological computer that could operate within individual living cells.

Last year, Endy and his team made news in delivering the other two core components of a fully functional genetic computer. The first was a type of rewritable digital data storage within DNA. They also developed a mechanism for transmitting genetic information from cell to cell, a sort of biological internet.

In a biological setting, the possibilities for logic are as limitless it makes it possible to test whether a given cell had been exposed to any number of external stimuli — the presence of glucose and caffeine.

BIL gates would allow you to make that determination and to store that information so you could easily identify those which had been exposed and which had not.

It is also possible to connect BIL gates with the team's biological internet, and it is possible to communicate genetic information from cell to cell to orchestrate the behaviour of a group of cells.

Then there will come the day when your cells are hacked and you are mutated into something less natural. 
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